Myra has bone cancer; she has been given about six months to live. Her family would prefer not to think about that - but the subject is hard to avoid when mum turns her funeral plans into a Powerpoint presentation. There may be a burial afoot, but if Myra has her way, it won't be of heads in the sand.
Laura Wade's play is set in the limbo between a death sentence and the death itself. How does the knowledge of one's imminent demise, or that of a loved one, affect the living of one's life? Myra (Margot Leicester) spends her last days dictating how her absence should be coped with. She buys the cardboard coffin and counsels husband Alec on his love life. Daughter Jenna practises withholding confidences from mum, a rehearsal of bereavement. Alec focuses on fixing the boiler, because "the least he can do is let her die in the warm".
In Abigail Morris's production, Wade's treatment of this domesticated death is low-key, reflective and funereal of pace. Myra's resignation casts a pall over proceedings; I would have welcomed a flash of rage against the dying of the light. But Wade makes no concessions to drama. She is faithful to the mundane passage of everyday life, as the family soldier on and Myra's time runs out.
On occasion, Colder Than Here feels too literal, like an inventory of the emotional, and sometimes biological, processes surrounding death. But it's leavened by wit and no little wisdom. I loved Alec's excuse for paying so little attention to his dying wife: "A watched pot never boils." And Wade is strong on the way that death (if only temporarily) makes us re-evaluate life. It pierces the heart to see Michael Pennington's Alec plant a hesitant kiss - his first for how many years? - on his wife's forehead. His is one of four sound performances in a play that, far from flinching in the face of death, explores how we might make peace with it.
· Until February 26. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
